Tim Barrus

People Called It Dodge.

Dodge City. Kansas. Kansas of the Scarecrows. Scarecrows outstretched arms aching from the tortures of the Inquisition and the pecking and the pecking of birds and that way they laugh because I was to not made to move. I am supposed to scare you off but no one is afraid of me. They always murder the messenger.

Dirt Bike Town is not unlike that, too. Bring in the next one.

Being the representative of Great Trouble Is Headed Your Way And they Aim To Chop Your heads Off. No one listens.

Release the doves.

We will spike the heads and hang them from trees. I can’t wait for morning, diamonds. I can’t wait for morning, diamonds. The bones of stars. All your second selves standing in the dark and drinking champagne from a paper cup.

The warmth from the nest stops time while sleeping in the woods is with the mist moving slowly across your face and wet nose dripping, you use your hoody arm to wipe across your the recesses of your tender face that stares straight into a sun the rest of us cannot see. Our sun or the blue one. Or both.

Most people go with both.

Never go with both.

I can see a diaspora coming closer and closer every day with the billowing clouds of dust. I must warn you, it’s never a good thing, all that dust and sand, the distances of pharaoh’s stone cliff of graphite rocks so when we break them, the diamonds all fall out and skitter across the floor.

It was the dirt bike that set us apart from other gangs and tribes. Never stare at my eyes. It would break my many dives into a sea that boils with antiquity. I see a scarecrow standing up, restrained, profaned, his hat flapping in a Heathcliff wind from across the wheat fields, the moor green as a spaceship, a sentinel who can see for miles and miles of procedural trials, standing upright with his fist into a twisted wind of straw. I can’t wait for morning, diamonds. — romeo void

Controversy is a pathfinder of trouble, and at times in your face honesty, humor, pathos, and willful perplexity the uncertain terrain of life itself that shatters assumptions, unsettles easy presumptions, and yet, while we walk through our day-to-day existence, the sheer gravitas of everything around us in our ordinary vision of our strange human experiment, bedazzles us, and we wonder why.

We do feel the faith until I showed up again. I parked the bike. Same bike. Same hugs. One night. Same screen door. Same boots. Same issues can I please wash my jeans cuz they're oozing greasing and the next thing, you all, is all spoon Lawful House in the suburbs, bacon grease because you all have given up my rivers of rain. I don't usually do this. Walks all in strings of things. Leather is leather. It's conflict, admit it, it's a dance with a shadow. You better pick it up because they're coming for everyone. Shadows turn into tornados and forest fighters, and ash on the ground. We live in another dimension and I can and prove it beyond the shadows of persistent hope somewhere someone will begin to understand where the shit does gravity come from -- or try -- to understand how gravity comes from red wheels of fortune all you have to do is open and cross your legs maybe. If that what lose a desert whirlwind straight for the refrigerator, a whirl suspended about the Red High Heel (bar) where no one cares much about fucking wrong numbers. What about my jeans you finger fuck. Wrong dimension. Wrong Ace of Spades. Wrong shoes. Just leave your number with the bartender. I'll get it just like I always do.  

Like The New York Times Listens. Not listening is the problem. Get over it.

I am a communist. It all begins with razor wire placed around the perimeter of what they call a "Health Center." I wrote the book: Genocide. What I see is a build up to the main event. I am so happy face that the government has decided we could all go to Health Centers to be healthy. The media cannot find this story. Give it up. As a kid, we learned quickly how to scale a fence. Any fence. The people in this writer's group have great ideas. You are all expert at articulating the issues. But you do not get that it is too late because you cannot face the reality of death. You are looking at how to build a culture from the ground up, a ground that is currently smoking with battlefield toxicity. This is not a culture war. It's war.

But we need leadership. Get over it. None of you agree on what to do about it. We have writers who see the minutiae as symbolism. You are right to do that. But you are grasping at What Will He Do Next. You are ruminating. The problem is that you are ruminating in print which is not exactly transparent. It just goes round and round. I find that when homo sapiens do that, you fall through the ice you've been skating on. I am terrified. You do not agree with this. But I know for a fact, he is coming to kill us. The military will not say no. I am begging you, please, ask them. I take photographs. I never write about how I actually feel and am confronted with. Because it's dangerous. Imagine: Health Centers surrounded by razor wire. Arbeit macht frei. 

In the beginning, you are immediately, a failure. I do not care how good you are. Publishing is the last bastion of clean pure malevolence in a marketplace of sadism. I have known more than a few editors. I had been one of them once. We did not share the same lament. I have never met another editor cringing in the darkness of the species who did not express to me exactly how they tolerated writers and how the writers made life hell itself. In other words, editors deplore writers. I would say they hate writers so I won’t say it. They hate writers because they, too, were writers. Once. Who failed.

I did. It comes for you in the night, and the Little People get into the blackshiny lace carriage. Up we go.

What’s it gonna do when it comes for you even when you think it won’t, and you embrace an audience you cannot know. Vegas does this like it’s a big blinking rest area. They will eat you alive. It is not an observation. We are all ancient Greece and no one knows or cares about why we are here, and most of us would rather not know. So we can get on with it, don’t jump too far ahead because the cave looks fucking ominous. You cannot observe without changing the thing itself. A minority opinion. Credit cards got invented.

Show me what is not a minority opinion.

The experience is an abstraction. You become the splots on the canvass. Has everyone seen my tits.

It’s flippant. It offends you. My eyes to the sky. The death threats have settled down a bit. If you wander too far from the status quo, they will find you, shun you, punish you, castrate you, jump up and down, accuse you of murder and masturbation, and claw into your mind in Esquire that portends to see into my brain.

I apologized. What is the point. They said I didn’t mean it.

How exactly do they peck around my cerebral cortex, oh, they don’t, but it can be explained by a moral failure, and humiliate you in the village square of pop culture melting temperatures leaking Rivers of No Return. What happens is a numbness, I feel compelled to wear my I am Not Autistic Mask I have failed so many times, it’s just fucking ridiculous.

I sound angrier than I am in person. Again. Immediately. But what kind of literary demon are you.

I used to snarl back. The New York Times is over me. I am tempted to keep responding but only use one word, and it would be (because it has to in the physics of it) absolutely inappropriate (like art) to go all the way back in the time machine to Year of the Wet Rat.

Not unlike the World’s Fair rotates. But it’s all the same World’s Fairs. Why. Because the observer affects what is being observed as measurements to be poured over as to define reality because you can’t be the World’s Fair twice. You can, but only three people will come. 

As one who is separated from mainstream publishing by all of the above. I just care about other things. It’s sophomoric. But there’s spinning and there is spin. When all of it becomes the spin, there is little hope of survival let alone the opportunity to spin another plate. Plates drop. Plate smash around. But now, the plates have been replaced by heads. Find a place. Join a club. And Spin It. 

This on Twitter. Great Writers Never Play Keepers of the Gates of Beautiful. Head on. You bend that knee into a crawl, you will not get up again. I have put entire multiple magazines together, and the blur of it is an emptiness of stereotypes because that is what sells. How to spin it remains the focus of the story. The only question is where is the arch. The academics will lob this one at you. They want to lob not listen. My argument is that publishing is medieval.

Boom.   

The internet kicked my white ass into the street.

And Amazon became publishing. History is repeated because that is how it becomes history. There are treasures up there but mostly not. Why. Because homo sapiens may congregate in the cave, but that does not mean they have explored the back of the cave, and they have no idea, really, how far it goes. Even with fire, it’s a black hole. They went from books to books. But we do not really know if the center will hold. Mass generated campaigns other websites have repeated times ten. Publishers want the thoroughbred. Triple Crown. Let’s go play cards, I count them. The horses and the finish line like get a clue, you become the glue. 

The cave was a learning experience in an evolution of speed. With fire, some became quite hot. It repelled animals. We forget that animals ate us. That is imprinted on a genetic scale. The limbic system is ready to jump in. Always on alert for animals in the back of the cave who have never seen such light before. No one could make this stuff up. But it was sand and sticks that made the first art disappear by cavepeople who had phones.

Waves ate everything. Waves still do.

God, please help me. Help you how, you idiot, help me endure the idiots. The ones who have no history of understanding in any other fundamental way, that the the writing was on the wall.

Was it an art exhibition where you had to have a guide to get there. Yes. No autistics asking questions was allowed. The Greeks knew what to do with you. History speaks in bones, and languages are bones, too. We drool and say funny things. Yes. We needed girl guides. I am leaning toward the reality it was a woman who embarked on Calligraphy in Caves. Whose walls represented abstract symbols, by which time abstract symbols were what we had. Like all we really do is exchange one cave for another. The writing on the wall is the message is, indeed, the media. Pop culture or does the pop pop. Everything pops in the popping of the multiverse where editors answer email.  

There are books because we understand that if the limbic system kicks in, we’re talking so far back in time, lizards roamed the planet longer than we have, and were apt to multiply. We looked like a wet rat. They didn’t even know we were there because mainly we existed under the ground. Most of us die in the great fire of whatever. Plates spinning and moving. Give it a rest. But no.

It’s a pop culture landscape of Second Selves. It will not support you. It has a Big Problem. Who gets to create the myths and take care of the children.

It was a woman who had painted the walls of caves in France. It was a record of this is how we live. Even in science fiction, much of whicj is actually literary fiction, but it gets homogenized to fill a slot at the warehouse and I am not kidding. I never kid.

You wanna see some good pictures. Come with me. 

But it doesn’t see itself (and either do I) as being irrelevant as a cartoon. When they tell you they want authenticity, they put it on you to define authenticity. Where’s my mouse mask. It always smiles and I’m Mary Tyler Moore with a beret. Liberalism is a defense that pretends to see a future your writers attempt to articulate with a lot a caveats. Like the discord is giving us a developmental headache.

The discord not unhistorical. The message is your comment moderator. What I see is AI, everywhere you turn.

You can create the infantile, but complexity approximates. That is why complexity is in itself, complex. Cells divide. They take off like dirt bikes. Because there are layers of communication, it’s okay to come out of the holes, now, and go eat trees and bugs.

To tell the story of it.

You are naked, sweating, running, fall over on the gravel, getting back up and running again, you arrive message in hand within the temple of the Spartan Court.

They got it.

I wonder if it really happened. Against Great Odds and Gods, We Endure. But we have not changed our hearts in our endurance of them. Endurance is the bell curve, it’s all homo sapiens have anyway. We endure but not everyone is satisfied with just survival because our brains prevent a problem with the skull size, and we have ways around it it, and new problems, too.

The hidden walls of the cave were hidden even then. No electric lights, if you can imagine it. It took some courage to do your thing with art knowing full well no one in human history will see it and tell the story of beauty being consumed, eaten by the carnivorous. -- tim barrus

New York Times

"The writer has been homeless, declared bankruptcy, never held a job more than a year and, to get by, has eaten canned dog food and written pornography. Given the absence of what we think of as the prerequisites for literary writing -- a quiet space, supportive friends, the bills mostly paid -- it is a kind of miracle that ''The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams'' was written, much less published. The writer is sui generis: his book reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society.

WASHINGTON POST

"Vivid and immediate, crackling with anger, humor, and love."

San Diego Union-Tribune

"Transcendent Narrative. Deeply felt, and beautifully told story about love."

HOUSTON CHRONICLE

"A touching account of a father's love for his son. Provokes the reader reader into examining life in the full. Devoted anger and deep compassion."

Raleigh News and Observer

"Prophetic and profane. In prose that once tortured by fate and graceful with faith. We are given a story unhinged from sentimentality and polite rue."

USA Today

Riveting, lyrical. It's a ragged wail of a song, an ancient song where we can learn what it is to truly be a parent and love a child.

It is Bellzebub: The Continuing Adventures of Romeo Void.

It smelled like bat shit.

Stomping around old derelict barns is a rush of I Am Not Going To Do This Anymore.

You rarely leave in the rain but you will always hit it. The bike just snarls like a bull will dare you to challenge him.

I had ridden my bike in the fucking rain for three days I am beyond soaking wet it is my own damn fault it was usually my fault and he canned me naked in that church it looked like a church but it was a school. 

This is where memory yields to physics. Turning water into wine. I only knew it when it was a school. We had to sit there quietly they put their Nazi boots on our heads we licked them when ordered to do so — oh, yes, Passolini, too. All witches from the Island of Jamaica.

Those people are dead. The past and memory help to keep you sane, but when one become the other, and the other becomes the other, there is an infinity of numbers. Or infinity is rhetoric. Most assume you cannot have both. You can. But it makes an exceedingly toxic dimension become impermeable.

Neutrinos do stew the stew.

They will question your sanity. It has always worked like this. If you keep your head down not as far down as the rats and the pigeons are just rats and pigeons slapping in definitely derelict in the dirty to the Passolini in the hurley burley of it.

All art is Memoir. It's a looking back at something, an event, even data, is caught up in the past as a pathway to yet more data.

Alice has invited everyone to a tea. There will be cakes. You like cakes. Never you mind the mouse in the teapot. All dimensions have all the room they need. Because the stars are dimming. The faster we are pulled apart we become apart as it is called a stripping of the molecules. It all becomes mist. What is the story of mist. The mist is an old skeleton of moss and drip and ancient blue salamanders who tried to get away. 

I outline stuff and then I go back and view the whole thing from other angles.

Physics is actually a very scary thing. I am truly humbled by it.

I struggle with angles and perception. I struggle with dimension. I know the strap was on the wall. Because I was staring at it. I yanked it off the wall, through it on the floor, and pissed on it.

It would have to be enough.

There is never enough. Of anything. We are capricious animals. I said I did not believe in no fucking god. And, you all, are stupid.

I had the matches.

I want to burn the past down. I want it to become the Book of Ashes. All the roads of ashes and the mud. Homo sapiens are created from mud.

We are those chemicals. Some of us are just exceptional. We seek interpretation. We seek a representation of the past the physics of the thing present an infinity of realities represented as data and all the interpretations of it.

And it had rained.

My matches were mush. You will meet your match with rain.

The homo sapiens who have a monopoly on interpretation -- or -- how much reality can you bear. It's about measuring, exactly that.

But was it strapped to the wall. A shadow of punishment after punishment and for saying no the word no got your motherfucker mouth washed out with soap. Still there in visages and my old desk and my ass sat wood upon the ground with the worms to a merriment, the red pill or the blue pill we need more pills in the world you do not know what violence is. My scars belong to me, but being autistic, bends me to your world of war and roses.

I think I might be Bellzebub. There it is. Hello. Hello it is so nice to meet you Mister Your High Highness Lord to the Earl of Dungeons and his Sister of the Sisters are always topless but they don’t show pussy…

Am I allowed to say pussy. Too much controversy.

No.

How did I get here, bitch.

I said bitch but I didn’t mean to so it doesn’t count I was the prince back then…

He’s mad.

Madness is my new Philisteen Gods and gods moron fucking gods that fruit titty in vanilla they always ruin it.

Grandpa. This is a novel. He doesn’t mean to. It’s the rum and cokes. Aren’t there any drinks on this carnivorous ship.

This is a novel.

How novel. It was not my fault.

Oh, it was your fault every goddamn time you walk out on that stage, erect like a hambuger.    

Is this the end of the play. I can do helicopter. It took me ten years of rehearsal I’m oversharing now. I want the opera rights, too, you all, cuz, I write my albino tits off  Go-College’s Jock TicTokAround the clock You Dickhead is that all you got got. Tell me this is some other totally Irish gonzonons from Limerick where do you think the diplomatic but not Organic South Comes from. We brought it over here into the survival grindering the grinders for the big Boneyard Town.

To feed the fish what are you looking at me, are you looking at me, who do you think you are, this is a tease of Elephant feed just waiting in the breeze of birds of beers we arrive upon the dust who knows historically what will come to be know far and wide, finally decide. What is life going to be on this planet. You have fucked it. I so hope, you all, have enjoyed You fucking it and fucking it up you have fucked it up the blame unlike the sane indifferent this Is a Tease, if you please continuing The Adventures of Romeo Void. Yes. What comes next. There is always a next. Until even the next (time) will become mist, too.

BAD AUTISTIC

Tim Barrus

Whenever I walked out onstage, the lights made my autistic head spin. Try it in 16th Century Drag. I made myself do it. Time and time again. I slapped my face on the bus.

You fool. It hurts. It always hurts.

My first speech was called Eating Someone Out Call Security.

Ballet class is not for the squeamish. My neurodick brain is following that same old see saw harpoon, written in blood in the slow afternoon. I was fundamentally scared shitless. But I had to Master It. It’s like doing yoga in Dutch Clogs. Part acrobat. Part orthopedic surgery. I was onstage and that is as far as I got. Sometimes, you have to decide to decide.

I decided.

I wanted someone to love. I wanted to eat them out but I also wanted to be loved back. What could possibly go wrong.

Okay, stop bugging me because I am part of some underworld of drugs and sex and What the Fuck right when the death threats were beginning to go away, you all, what with the Pirate Boats…

I never once went on a pirate boat. Do the young men of today even consider joining a pirate ship .

I never once in my entire existence wanted to be the garden variety pain in the ass. I’m used to it by now. He shrugs. Bones are not all that see saw as Jack Candlestick jumps anything in a swimsuit. Jack Candlestick became a lawyer for the mob. Slap my face again on the bus. I have to sit on the ground way do I know these people. There are always people in this process who do not even know what the fuck voodoo is.

What does the word autistic even mean to you.

I’m not autistic so how could I know.

Know what.

You know what.

Mom said I was in charge.

Who gives a fuck what that witch said. 

Where the fuck do you live.

I would love to see my family.

You have no family.

I have no family.

You are a dinosaur.

How old are you.

Twelve.

You don’t look quite twenty-seven.

Oh, forty-two.

This was my family at the races. Eating people out, paying as you go, and usually they return to Ireland and have hundreds and hundreds of I Do Not Know What To Call Them but Carnival Girls Will Do. They all wanted to buy something like pharmaceuticals andIrishMuse. . I sailed on that sailboat, the ancient HMS Fantom that was a Windjammer owned by the Prince of Wales. Sailing full out and your blood is like tasting irony is made from gin and sin.

Were you there. As well.

Yes, Mister Detective whatever it takes to solve this crime.

What crime.

The crime of reading banned books during the Spanish Inquisition. Fuck you and your Spanish electrons.

I’m like an electron. Everywhere at once. How is that even feasible. As a writer, it sounded appropriate, but do we run out of rum when we get there.

Yes.

No. No. No.

Hold him down.

Shut up or we get slapped in the face by the Gestapo. The worst of the worst knee-high leather boots on the ground for sail the trade winds on this voyage.

I did climb up there up there where my head is screaming Get a Grip.

You’ve read our books because everyone from earth to the biddy moon to Mars wants to see that show and there is no way that the mentally ill, which means everyone in this room is a pirate but me. And I wanna be a pirate, too.

How old are you. How old do I have to be.

Eighteen. Years.

Lesson Summary: If they cannot sail like the lot of them are not unlike like the pussy willows in the wind of the English Republic of Elizabeth Taylor and/ or Cleopatra. But I loved the elephant.

How are you.

Romeo Void.

Why is it that you change the subtexts most of the time.

And this is my annoying brother, Mitya. Oh, no. You didn’t.

I’m afraid I did. I wanna ride that elephant, too.

Perhaps I should move to Rome, my brother, Mitya.

Tonight. Tonight.

Then Rome It Is.

How does he do that or rather, why does he do that.

Are you a writer. I wouldn't call me a writer writer. I was hoping you could call me Professor Chips.

Yes.

Call Security. 

Tim Barrus on Vintage Attraction by Charles Blackstone. (Amazon)

I bought a restaurant.

Some time ago. When I was sixteen, I managed two bars and room service. I try not to remember that. Maybe it never happened and just play the autistic card. It was a lot of crackerjack for a kid. I take too many risks. Especially in relationships. I overestimate.

I was so busted. My job is never over.

My restaurant was rough, and my booze (for which I had no license) was from an elderly man from Palermo. I kid you not.

Gumbo was about it. 

All writing is about what you can get away with. Mine and everyone who has ever tried. Because we mainly think that you all don’t drink enough. You guys in Chicago are very thirsty. But I always love another bar fight in Chicago because they mean it.

Don't kill anyone. Those guys have bats.

Art has no purpose. Blackwell keeps pushing life forward but he’s the kind of guy who seems to have both questions and no small amount in pause, itself. To look around him in a wonder he sees we never quite see. Balance is physics. The book has a rhythm. It comes in the layering. You taste the wine, and then, you see the people behind the wine, and guess what, they're people.  

We all know this is Charles (narrator trustworthy) not Pete but Charles only looks like Pete who is really Charles. My life. Your paragraph. Mine, too. Internal dialogues drive the novel but not to Zelda Fitzgerald.

Because neither the book or the romance of good wine (would sustain moi) is a hall of mirrors where sustain is a kind of shadow god, oh, and it’s mysterious. I do not know why but the soft landing of the wine (and local TV) makes the rumble in the urban background unbound like a woman’s flesh. 

I loved the scenes in bars with the dark wooden gleam. Woody Allen could be the dishwasher. Gotta light.

The author is showing you the hemline in the story. For me, it was all noir, but one filled with questions and relationships — nevertheless, there is a third partner here — the wine. Just like managing a bar, any bar, you make it up as you go alone not unlike the sun also rises.

There is a breaking point. “All of it is surreal.” But so is noire because the moment is the point. Moment after moment. Because that is what the truly good and gracious writers do, this is what it’s all about. The electric cellar. The dialogue with the fearful and the courages self. Where to read about your second self is to write about that spark of moment to moment dance on and off and off outside the living in the relationship and about what if it all falls apart because layer and after layer is a romance with the act of language and change and it’s always hard, but it gives you an insight into how complex the animal is to taste what holds you to some other journalist who shot off guns in the air to scare off submarines, the guy who freed the Ritz.

so we built a dock/ to jump in/ from/ not unlike dogs who hesitate then pause, now jump/ we would never, ever, ever ever, swim naked at night with jack daniels being jack and all, and the trees ate the sun up when it was time to dive deep yet within her pregnant pause/ -- tim barrus

STAND UP AND FIGHT. NYT: I am a communist. Yes, They are gunning for journalists. I agonized and twisted in the wind whether or not to send my kids to another country. I was right to do it. I would do it again. Americans want a culture war, not a debate, but the kind of war where everyone hurts, and some people do not survive it. Americans elected a deviant who has set out to kill us. Get over it. Institutions have no backbone and do not fight back because their investment (writ large) is so personally enormous, family, house, vehicle, kids, schools, is a stability you fight for, even when stability has been off the table for some time. Who wins, who loses, who gets to walk across the stage of hatred and how can the deviant chew the fresh meat off the bone. Education is the sitting duck. It will now make nice with the criminals in power. Why rip off a system when the system will just hand you whatever you want. Education will fall like dust. It is too labyrinthine to even imagine. Education is a cranky vision. Education is about jobs, not education. There are no little islands of sanity when the gloves come off. But someday, the deviant will come to his senses. It's a bigger problem than that, the deviant actually wants to kill us all. You never listen. Shutting us down is easy.  It's called softening us up. Then, the full and final push, the deviant wins an empty country, which is exactly what he wants and sees himself as god's messenger. Just lay low. Journalists are next. Or stand up and fight.